Terms of Use

The agreement between you and us. Written in ordinary language on purpose — an agreement nobody can read is not much of an agreement.

Version 1.0 · In effect from ·

1. Who you are agreeing with

The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act asks anybody offering a service online to say plainly who they are. So:

Agreeing to these terms — by ticking the box when you make an account, or by carrying on using the service after we have asked you to read them — makes an agreement between you and that company.

2. What BrideHub is, and what it is not

BrideHub is a place to plan. It is a tool, in the way a notebook is a tool.

We are not a party to your arrangements with any wedding supplier. If you use BrideHub to record a quote from a photographer, or to note that a venue is booked, that is you writing something down. The agreement is between you and them. We hold no deposit, we take no commission on it, we do not guarantee that anybody will turn up, and we have no say in what happens if they do not. If something goes wrong with a supplier, your argument is with the supplier.

We do not give legal, financial or contractual advice. A budget line is arithmetic, not advice.

BrideHub is an early service and is still being built. Sections are added, changed and occasionally taken away. We will not remove something you rely on without warning, but you should read this as a service that is growing rather than one that is finished.

3. Your account

• You must be 18 or older to open an account.
• Give an email address that actually reaches you. It is how we send a password reset, how we warn you before a wedding is deleted, and how we tell you if something goes wrong.
• Your password is yours to look after. Do not share it. If you think somebody else has it, change it and tell us.
• One account is one person. If you want your partner in, invite them — there is a button for it — rather than handing over your password. An invited partner who accepts can see and change the whole wedding, which is the point; either of you can end that at any time.
• You are responsible for what is done through your account.

4. What it costs

The planning service is free to couples. That is not an introductory trick.

We intend to earn money from wedding suppliers who choose to list in a supplier directory. That part is not running yet, and when it does it will have its own terms, be paid through a registered payment provider, and have nothing to do with what a couple pays — which is nothing.

If we ever did decide to charge couples for something, we would tell you well beforehand, it would apply to new things rather than retroactively to what you already have, and you would be able to take your wedding and leave without paying us a cent.

5. What you put in is yours

You keep every right you have in what you upload — your photographs, your words, your lists. We do not own them and we do not claim to.

To be able to show your wedding back to you we need your permission to store it, copy it between our servers and backups, resize your pictures so they load on a phone, and display them to you, to a partner you invite and to whoever you publish to. That permission is limited to running the service for you, lasts only as long as you keep the content on BrideHub, and ends when you delete it.

We will not use your wedding photographs in our advertising. Not on the website, not on social media, not in a brochure — unless you have specifically said yes to that particular use, in writing, and you can change your mind.

6. What you may not do

• Break the law with it, or help anybody else to.
• Upload anything you do not have the right to upload — somebody else's photographs, music or writing included.
• Upload anything unlawful, abusive, or of a kind that has no business being on a wedding website.
• Record personal information about somebody that you have no proper reason to hold. Section 7 is about this.
• Try to reach another couple's wedding, work around the rules that keep accounts apart, or test our security without asking us first. If you find a fault, please tell us at — we would much rather hear from you than from somebody else.
• Scrape the service, or run automated tools against it, without our written agreement.
• Resell the service or pass it off as your own.

7. Your guests are people too

A guest list is other people's personal information — names, what they cannot eat, sometimes children. South African law (POPIA) puts obligations on whoever decides to collect it, and for your guest list that is you, not us. We hold it and keep it safe on your instruction.

What that asks of you, in practice, is small:

• Only record what the wedding actually needs. You do not need somebody's medical history to seat them.
• Let your guests know you are keeping a list and that it is on a service like this one — a line on the invitation does it.
• If a guest asks you to correct or remove their details, do it. You can, in seconds.
• If you publish a wedding website or open an album, remember it can be seen by whoever has the link.

If a guest comes to us instead of to you, we will deal with it and tell you.

8. Publishing, and the album

Both are yours to switch on, and both are off until you do.

• A published wedding website is on the public internet. We ask search engines not to index it; that is a request, not a fence.
• An album photograph can be opened by anybody holding the exact link to it. The links are long and unguessable, and you can hide the album — but hiding the album is not a lock on each picture. Do not put anything genuinely private in there.
• You can unpublish, close the album or delete anything in it whenever you like.
• We may remove content that breaks section 6, and we will tell you why.

9. Whether it works

We work hard to keep BrideHub running and quick. We cannot promise it will never be down: it depends on hosting providers, internet connections and electricity, and we control none of those.

We take encrypted backups, and we will do our best to recover anything lost. But the only copy you truly control is the one on your own computer, and there is a button that downloads your whole wedding — photographs at full size, guest list as a spreadsheet — precisely so you can have one. If your wedding matters to you, press it now and again.

10. Ending it

You may stop at any time, for any reason or none. Delete your account from inside the app and everything goes; section 8 of the Privacy Notice says exactly what "goes" means.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, is being used unlawfully, or puts other people at risk. Except where the law or the seriousness of the matter makes that impossible, we will tell you first, say why, and give you seven days to download everything before anything is deleted — and during those seven days one press from us puts it all back.

We also delete weddings that are long past or long abandoned, on the schedule in section 8 of the Privacy Notice, after warning you three times with a download link in every message.

11. What we are responsible for

We will provide the service with reasonable skill and care.

We are responsible for loss we actually cause. We are not responsible for:

• anything a wedding supplier does or fails to do;
• what you or your guests choose to put into the service, or who you choose to show it to;
• loss caused by something genuinely outside our control, such as a national power failure or an internet outage;
• indirect or consequential loss — lost profit, lost opportunity, or distress arising from something we could not reasonably have foreseen.

Where our liability can lawfully be limited, it is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the problem — which, while the service is free, is nothing. That is plainly a low cap, and we would rather say so than bury it.

Nothing in this section limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or dishonesty, for gross negligence, or for anything else that South African law does not permit us to limit. Sections 48, 49 and 51 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 restrict what a supplier may exclude, and where they conflict with anything above, the Act wins.

12. Your rights as a consumer

The Consumer Protection Act gives you rights that no agreement can take away: to fair and honest dealing, to plain language, to disclosure, and to complain. These terms do not exclude them and are not meant to.

If you think we have treated you unfairly, tell us first — most things are a misunderstanding. If that gets nowhere, you may take it to the National Consumer Commission, or to a court. You do not need our agreement to do either.

13. If these terms change

We will publish the new version here with a new number and date. If a change actually affects you — as opposed to fixing a typo — we will email you and ask you to read and agree before you carry on. If you would rather not agree, you may close your account and take everything with you, and nothing will be deleted before you have had the chance.

14. The legal odds and ends

• These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.
• If a court finds any part of this unenforceable, the rest carries on without it.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to.
• You may not transfer your agreement with us to somebody else. We may transfer ours if the business is sold, on condition that your rights are unaffected.
• These terms and the Privacy Notice are the whole agreement between us about the service.

15. Reaching us

Email for anything at all, or for anything about your personal information. There is a person at the other end and we answer.

Version 1.0 · In effect from · Privacy Notice